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The Tipsy Hero

A student in one of my English classes recently asked about the endless references to drinking wine in “The Odyssey.” The question, which had nothing to do with my lesson, was a good one. Wine has a constant presence in the epic poem, whose most famous image is probably Homer’s evocation of the “wine-dark sea” that Odysseus sails in search of his native Ithaka. Sometimes it is mere tonic on an impossibly long journey home from the Trojan War, but on occasion wine is more powerful than the sword, as when Odysseus escapes from the Cyclops by getting him drunk. Homer may have been blind, but his taste buds were alive to wine, and he reserved his richest adjectives for it: heady, mellow, ruddy, shining, glowing, seasoned, hearty, honeyed, glistening, heart-warming, and, of course, irresistible.

How to wreck a symposium: have one too many bowls of wine and hit on Socrates.

Much of “The Odyssey,” with its endless feasting and fighting, reads like a James Bond escapade with wine bowls instead of martini glasses, but in the classroom lessons on heroic archetypes and dactylic hexameter prevail. After all, it is unlikely that any standardized test will ask about the intricate drinking rituals that permeated the culture of ancient Greece. But the breathtaking wine kraters in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the dialogues of Plato, the plays of Euripides, all attest to a longstanding relationship with alcohol.

The Greeks taught us plenty about philosophy, government and art. And we can learn from their drinking, too. They loved wine, yet knew that its consumption must be carefully controlled. The fermented grape was an exalted, mysterious object: the notion of “needing” to get drunk, of using alcohol to deaden the difficulties of being alive, would have seemed like the perversion of a passion enjoyed by gods and mortals alike.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t spend my free time offering libations to Dionysus, but I admire how open the Greeks were about the role of alcohol in their society (unsurprising, perhaps, for a people whose highest ideal was “the examined life”). In modern times, it seems we readily migrate to the extremes, either abusing alcohol or treating it as if it doesn’t exist, without acknowledging a healthy middle ground. As a constant conduit between the realms of adulthood and innocence, I find this particularly troublesome because too many young adults will discover drinking in a rowdy fraternity or a bar that doesn’t care much about whom it serves. Surely, there must be something for them between “Animal House” and the Anti-Saloon League.

It is unlikely that a modern-day Aristotle would ever find himself in the basement of Delta house playing beer pong to the sounds of Lynyrd Skynyrd (he might have also wondered why a house full of J. Crew-clad lacrosse players is called “Greek”). In his excellent “Courtesans & Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens,” James Davidson describes the symposium, a “classic moderate drinking-party” common to the wealthier households of Athens, during which men of stature would engage in lively debate, with bowls of wine dispensed under the careful watch of a symposiarch (a sort of strict toastmaster). The most famous of these is described in Plato’s “Symposium,” where Socrates and his friends, still hung over from the previous night’s carousing, decide on an evening of light drinking. The temperance pays off: in the ensuing discussion, they summon an overarching vision of love that has endured in the Western imagination for more than two millennia.

But amidst their philosophical euphoria, there is a strong note of warning about moderation: the handsome youth Alcibiades “arrives in a state of high intoxication,” Davidson writes. He drunkenly tries to cozy up to the older Socrates, who has no patience for his prurient come-ons and intimations. Alcibiades is eventually subdued, but soon a group of boozy revelers bursts in. “There was noise everywhere, and everyone was made to start drinking in no particular order,” Plato dryly records. The drinking party comes to an unceremonious conclusion because love of drink overpowers love of truth.

Order had a counterpart in Greece, not merely in a disorganized happy-hour sort of debauchery, but a controlled ecstasy that allowed the Greeks to plumb the depths of intoxication without drowning in them. Today “irrational exuberance” means bankruptcies and foreclosures; for the Greeks, a measure of irrationality checked the rule of reason. When the world – remarkably similar to our own in its stresses and struggles – intruded too much on their inner selves, the Greeks sought refuge in what the classical scholar E.R. Dodds calls, in his seminal “The Greeks and the Irrational,” the “less conscious level of human experience.”

Wine provided that respite from rational thought, especially during the festivals for Dionysus that eventually gave rise to theatrical performance. “Dionysus offered freedom,” Dodds writes. “He was essentially a god of joy,” unlike the more reserved champion of reason Apollo. But the Greeks also understood that it was easy for the seductive ecstasy of drink to degenerate into ugly abuse. The playwright Euripides, in his “Bacchae,” describes a group of women who, under the spell of Dionysus, murder King Pentheus of Thebes by tearing apart his limbs. The dark side of consuming “fountains of wine” is on gruesome display.

None of this made it into my classroom. Maybe I was too frightened to tackle such a mature subject with such a young crowd; or maybe the English teacher’s customary obsession with covering every grammatical concept and literary term simply drove me to more practical shores. But my student’s question did engender a lively, if brief, conversation. Someone thought that it was unseemly for a hero to drink, while others figured that with his sights set on home, Odysseus didn’t have much time to nurse a hangover. There would be time for wine to flow, they argued.

I wasn’t quite satisfied, and the question continued to bother me until, days later, I found a passage in “The Odyssey” that succinctly captures the complexity of the Greek attitude towards alcohol. Odysseus is speaking to a sympathetic swineherd, and though he is in disguise, the words have the unmistakable ring of honesty:

[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told.

After two decades away from home, there must have been so much to say, so many bottled-up tales of friends lost and battles won. Somebody get the poor guy another round.

Wine should be pushed as a drink over Ouzo and Tequila…As a Greek, Ritisina which has the taste of Reisin from trees, was introduced to the Greek Wine during the Turkish domination for 500 years so that the taste would not be liked by the Turks so as not to drink the wine..But people got used to the taste..what else can I say…The Turks dominated the Greeks for those years..The Moslems agaings the Christians….Today it is a little different.

King Pentheus of Thebes is murdered by the Bacchae not as a side-effect of their wine consumption but as a direct result of the king’s refusal to pay homage to the foreign god Dionysus. Such a denial of respect for “unknown” gods was considered hubris. Thus Dionysus induces madness via intoxication and the queen dismembers her own son under the delusion that he is a lion.
Perhaps the more potent lesson is not the measure needed in drinking but the survival value of paying respect to people’s freedom of religion.

I think you have it partly right, but I would not say the symposium was a model of moderation. Certainly the vase-painted images of what could go on at them does not suggest much by way of temperance. There’s the famous image of the youth on his way home from a symposium vomiting profusely on the street, or forensic speeches where plaintiffs complain of being accosted by drunken rivals and beaten up in the streets. I’m not convinced the Solonian aphorism “all things in moderation” was a maxim many Greeks lived by!

There were also drinking games — kotibos, or flicking sediment from one’s cup into the mixing bowl — that would probably have entailed greater degrees of intoxication than you seem to think. Your use of the case of Alcibiades in Plato is good, but I suppose the flipside of the incident is that there were other symposia — such as the one Alcibiades or the drunken revelers came from — where heavy drinking evidently took place. Which was the “norm,” then? The idealized symposium of the philosophical debate, or the raucous session of Alcibiades and his ilk?

Right on. After watching movies like ‘Alexander’ I’ve come to appreciate the fine art of getting drunk after a victory. It makes life that much more worth living to engage in debauchery after a hard battle at work. Maybe we don’t engage in hard debaucheries because our battles are so feeble and so feebly fought.

Perhaps it Should have made it into your classroom, it is exactly the message kids need to learn, and while te language of homer is beautiful, we don’t read him after 4000 years for the Grammar! The content of Homer, and the ideas he makes us consider is what’s important. If they are old enough to ask, they are old enough for an answer, and a discussion!

I especially think it was worth discussing with our students as you have a fine clear grasp of what then Greek way of life and thought can tech us in contrast to our own ideas on a difficult topic.

I may have to pick up my Fagles’ translation of The Odyssey and re-read it. At the time I first read it, and other translations before it I wasn’t unduly struck by the alcohol consumption. I’m wondering if times are affecting perception.

I’m also somewhat curious about the strength of the wine they drank – I’m assuming it was more like strong beer if not weaker after being mixed with something else.

I’ve assumed that the current Retsina (resinated wine) was perhaps drank in ancient Greece. Wikipedia to the rescue – yes. I’ve has some in Greek restaurants trying to imagine those times – but I find the taste challenging. I may have been the only Athenian teetotaler.

“[I]t is the wine that leads me on, the wild wine
that sets the wisest man to sing at the top of his lungs,
laugh like a fool – it drives the man to dancing…it even
tempts him to blurt out stories better never told. ”

And to do those things which wake me shuttering
in the night years later, that once I did without a thought.

if i remember right, but i have imbibed a bit myself, wine is necessary in the perfect city in The Republic, precisely because it reveals the inhibitions of the Guardians–and we as citizens judge them by this.
So, i guess the frat fellas are out; no beer pong in Athens.

When you say “In modern times, it seems we readily migrate to the extremes, either abusing alcohol or treating it as if it doesn’t exist, without acknowledging a healthy middle ground,” don’t you mean “in modern America”? There are other places in the world, with different drinking cultures…

Mr. Nazaryan’s tale of classroom and clinking wine glasses is one with which I can identify. For 30 years I taught Art History in a public school on Long Island. Art’s history is dominated by mythology and religions of all cultures, none of which excluded the joys of the grape. Drinking and dancing are major subjects in painting and sculpture. Dionysus was often a central character and the joys of drinking were enthusiastically displayed. Sex was even more visible and I had a difficult time dealing with Zeus and his exploits even more than the drinking. Many a lively, if uncomfortable, discussion ensued over “The Rape of Europa” or “Leda and the Swan”. The story of Achilles and Penthelesia occupied a full hour of class time. One particular Halloween an entire class came to school dressed as characters from the “Illiad”. Especially impressive was one of my senior’s depiction of Ajax with a cardboard sword going through his torso. Caravaggio was most adept at drinking scenes. Max Beckmann’s paintings were filled with images and allusions to mythology as well as self-portraits with a drink in his hand.

I won’t say anything new if I point out that even today, in mediterranean cultures wine plays a different role in peoples lives and people in general have a much more healthy relationship to it, than in America or northern parts of Europe. Wine is more often a part of a good meal and long talks after than part of an evening where one just gets drunk. Seems there’s a part of the classical culture still living on today

SPLENDID!
I am almost 75 and about … half a century ago I started drinking wine during meals. I believe that a glass of wine every day is a WONDERFUL medicine for the body and the soul. (But then my old father was a living example of a great, wise person. (Perhaps because he LIVED on Greek philosoophy and literature?)
Besides, I noticed that teetotallers are usually unfriendly persons!
CAVE ABSTEMIOS HOMINES!
Donatella (from Rome), (who LOVES ancient Greeks!)

I think your topic is both excellent and interesting: booze and heroism…discuss. However, I think you missed your chance for clarity in your rather dismissive analysis of Euripides’s Bacchae. If you recall, in the play, Pentheus is motivated by a sober prurience to spy upon the wine-drunk women — a classical production of girls gone wild. The women, by contrast, are drunkly motivated by heroism. They believe that they are slaughtering wild animals and thereby protecting their society. Agave, Pentheus’s mother, triumphantly enters the city with his head on a pike, thinking that she has slain a dragon — instead she finds she has contracted the eternal hangover. If you think that this play embodies a Greek ideal of temperance, I think you may be missing its fundamental point: You (women, infidels, children, slaves) are not capable of heroism, and therefore forever barred from the mysteries of the wine dark sea.

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For the past 10,000 years or so, wherever humans have gathered, there has been alcohol. Some never touch the stuff. But most do. It is used to celebrate, commiserate, mourn, remember and, often, to forget. It is different things to different people: libation, anesthetic, emotional crutch, social lubricant, addictive substance, sacred potion, killer or commodity. In "Proof," contributors consider the charms, powers and dangers of drink, and the role it plays in their lives.